There is a growing trend of women handing over childcare to their men.

I’ve spotted them at the school gates, looking dazed and slightly dishevelled as they hand over packed lunches and field trip slips. Traces of glue stick to their fingers from a late night spent building a pyramid out of cereal packets for a class project. The stay-at-home dads used to be a rare sight but now they’re a fixture at most schools – their number has tripled in the past 15 years.

One reason is the way the workforce has changed. Not only are more men losing jobs, but many who are still employed are experimenting with home-based work: a laptop allows you to avoid the commute, office politics and air conditioning. Another reason, though, for Daddy to stay home is that Mummy won’t. An increasing number of women are married to their jobs, and want little or nothing to do with household chores or childcare. The Germans and Swiss have a word for it: Rabenmütter, or raven’s mothers. The phenomenon has spread over here: 1.2 million fathers are primary carers, and in an increasing number of divorce settlements, women are handing over the children to the men.

Rabenmütter do love their children. They enjoy their little successes at school; they like seeing their faces light up at birthday parties; and they relish watching offspring progress from the two times table to Keynesian economics. But while Rabenmütter love children, they hate childcare. They refuse to get sucked into arrangements regarding sleep-overs and piano lessons. They abhor the messy spills and inconclusive chats that fill home life; and they lack the patience to build an Armada out of paper.

For this, Rabenmütter believe, the children can turn to Dad. He can wipe their snotty noses just as well as Mother could – if she weren’t at a breakfast meeting in the City. He can drive the children to swimming lessons, while Mother in her corner office clinches the deal.

Some will worry that this role reversal is emasculating for men, and bad for children. But I’d say we’ve been here before. The Rabenmütter remind me of the father of yore – providing for the family he is absent from.

I don’t know whether Alma Mahler was one of these Rabenmütter, but she was certainly a man-eater. Gustav Mahler’s talented, if self-regarding, wife had a notorious love life that included Oscar Kokoschka and the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. We were invited to the Czech embassy to celebrate this extraordinary muse last Saturday. It was a proper salon, featuring a concert, short lectures on architecture and psychology, as well as serious conversation. Michael Zantovsky, the ambassador, hopes it will catch on. It well might – especially if they offer such titillating insights as how Kokoschka, rejected by Alma, had a toymaker build a lifesize doll in her image. Over two years, the artist obsessively demanded that every detail of his doll be accurate, from the hue of her brows to the softness of her skin. No wonder a few doors down from the Mahlers a new type of doctor was very, very busy: Sigmund Freud.

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When the leading contender in France’s presidential race, François Hollande, wanted to rally his supporters, he gave a magisterial speech in which he quoted Shakespare’s immortal line: “They failed because they did not start with a dream.” But – mon dieu! – M Hollande was not quoting the Bard, rather, this newspaper’s book critic, Nicholas Shakespeare. I find it touching that a French politician should think a reference to England’s greatest dramatist could win him votes. Ed Miliband dropping Molière’s name into a speech about unions is not most people’s idea of a crowd-pleaser. Much better, given Miliband’s uninspiring message and nasal delivery, if he took a leaf from France’s new sensation, The Artist – and stayed mute.